CPSIA Update: The Law Actually Endangers Kids

National radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, a lawyer and law professor, has been doing his best to keep the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act’s economic harm front and center in the public policy debate. In a column today in The Examiner, he points out what off-road vehicle enthusiasts have been saying for months: By banning ATVs and minibikes and the like designed for children’s use, the law will encourage kids to ride bigger, adult-sized motorcycles. The result will be injuries and death.

It is embarrassing to admit that such a well-intentioned law has gone so badly wrong, but is wounded pride enough to keep Nancy Pelosi –a grandmother– from acting to stop a real threat of real injury and death to children?

Apparently so. The reluctance of Congress to do a small but urgently necessary correction to an overbroad law is a warning of what to expect when its massively much more complicated “health care reform” kicks in and the law of unintended consequences begins to roll forward.

Or “cap and trade.” Compared to health-care reform or energy-rationing legislation, the CPSIA was a modest law, and yet it brings with it billions of dollars of economic damage, lost jobs and ruined livelihoods.